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PC Magazine (along with Forbes, Reuters, and others) reports that those on the rightmost edge of the graph for Verizon's "unlimited" 4G LTE service are about to hit a limit: [T]hose in the top five percent of Verizon's unlimited data users (which requires one to pull down an average of just around 4.7 gigabytes of monthly data or so) who are enrolled on an unlimited data plan and have fulfilled their minimum contract terms (are now on a month-to-month plan) will be subject to network throttling if they're trying to connect up to a cellular tower that's experiencing high demand." As the article goes on to point out, though,
[A] user would have to hit all of these criteria in order to have his or her connection slowed down. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, giving even more weight to the fact that Verizon's throttling — while annoying on paper — won't affect a considerable majority of those still holding on to their unlimited data plans.

It doesn't matter. If customers are paying for it, throttling them should be seen as illegal. I've been a Verizon Wireless customer for over a decade and these recent decisions to screw their own customers have led me to the decision I don't want Verizon anything. Not their phones, Internet, anything. Switching to T-Mobil this week.

Unlimited bandwidth is not possible. You can make it illegal all you want. It doesn't trump physics.

Solution: Don't lie and call it unlimited. The point is that customers are paying for something Verizon calls "unlimited" which is not actually unlimited. The customers contracts are up so they can put those customers on other plans, the problem is when they still call the altered plan "unlimited."

well since verizon (and other ISP's) get to redefine words like 'unlimited', i'll redefine the term "dollar" to "liberian dollar".. i just need to find a way to sneak that into fine print.. and i should be good to go.

I agree. Verizon should never have grandfathered these plans in their current pricing model doesn't allow for it. I had unlimited EVDO data which is very different than what unlimited data would be today.

Since the contract period expired, as stated in the summary, then they really aren't violating a contract are they? The summary mentions customer who had unlimited plans and are still off contract after the contract's expiration.

You are correct, Verizon can do this leaglly (unless the FCC ever gets their act together), but not for the reason you mention. There is still a contract, with agreements about what services will be provided, and how much those services will cost. Unlimited data is one of those services. The "contract period" is simply the minimum length of time the contract will be in effect without the customer having to pay an early termination fee. If Verizon wants to change any terms of the service (throttling, no unli

Unlimited bandwidth is not possible. You can make it illegal all you want. It doesn't trump physics.

Solution: Don't lie and call it unlimited. The point is that customers are paying for something Verizon calls "unlimited" which is not actually unlimited. The customers contracts are up so they can put those customers on other plans, the problem is when they still call the altered plan "unlimited."

you really have two choices: 1. punish the heaviest users; 2. punish everyone.

pick one.

Nonsense. Just state what the real plans are with the appropriate prices and let the customer choose what they want. The free market in action. Just stop the fraud.

you really have two choices: 1. punish the heaviest users; 2. punish everyone.

There is a third choice, 3. expand capability.

Find the towers that sometimes saturate. Then take some of the profits Verizon creates, and increase those towers' capacity, or just outright add new towers. Adding towers would improve coverage, boost signal strength, and in general cut power requirements both for the tower and the customer's phone.

The smaller the tower, the easier it is to hide it. The regulatory hurdles you must clear are proportional to the output power of the cell tower. So making them smaller and lower power means it's easier to install.

Too late. TFA is about what happens while the tower is saturated, how they divide the available bandwidth between the customers WHEN IT'S SATURATED. Once that has already occurred, it's too late to go back and do analysis and not do what they are doing. They do in fact add towers as you suggest, but this story is about what happens when the tower first becomes overloaded. The overload has to be handled somehow immediately, while it's occurring.

Verizon spends a fortune adding capacity. They are doing that. But that doesn't address the problem that whatever the capacity is today has to be shared today. And there are choices between how that is allocated.

So now people who purchase and pay for a service, then actually use it, are wrong-doers who should be punished? You have, of course, presented a false dichotimy. They have been serving me the data at the current rate without "punishing" anyone. That is the service I paid for, and it is what they have profited from. Their only valid choices are: 1) Don't sell the service 2) Sell the sevice, and then provide the service for which they have been paid.

Neither is downloading an unlimited amount in a finite period at any finite speed, no matter how fast. The point of an unlimited bandwidth plan is so that one does not experience any unexpected fees for excessive usage, regardless of how much they actually end up using the service. If Verizon doesn't have the infratstructure to support its subscribers having such plans, then they shouldn't be offering them.

The fact that they literally can't download an infinite quantity of content in a month is irrelevant.

If you're just adverse to the notion of "unlimited bandwidth" you can think of unlimited bandwidth plan, as actually a cap at whatever the theoretical maximum could be if they were downloading 24/7 at full speed for the entire billing cycle, the maximums of which are dictated by the physical hardware and technology... which is only limited by what we can do today, but if the technology improves, the cap goes up with it, with no defined upper bound. And that's the "unlimited" that is being referred to.

I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me or to somebody else, because what you are saying is pretty much what I had said... that any so-called limits that might exist arise as a consequence of a limitation of the technology, and since there is no pre-defined notion of just how fast that technology can become, it can still be considered unlimited in that sense.

Verizon offered unlimited "data," as in no artificial limit on the amount of data that you could download using that bandwidth. Verizon subsequently imposed artificial limits on the amount of data that users could download per month on other plans. Verizon is now limiting bandwidth based upon the amount of data one has downloaded combined with a somewhat arbitrary measure of congestion -- they don't bother to specify what utilization threshold a cell base station has to cross to be considered "congested" so as to trigger the limitation.

Physics has nothing to do with that limitation. Physics does not dictate that a shared resource be preferentially allocated to those not on an "unlimited" plan because the provider quite badly wants to push users onto pay-per-quantity plans without taking the PR hit necessary to actually terminate the now month-to-month unlimited contracts.

Unlimited bandwidth is not possible. You can make it illegal all you want. It doesn't trump physics.

4 Gig is a long way from unlimited.

But even unlimited was always understood to be limited because there are only so many hours in a day you could conceivably pull data over an unlimited network.

Still 10Gig used to be what the carriers were bitching about. Now its the top 5%. Here's a clue Verizon: The top 5%, like the poor, will always be with us. And punishment on a sliding percentage based scale eventually even reaches average users as average is driven ever downward. After they kill of the 4 gig gob

Verizon no longer sells unlimited plans and probably doesn't have many unlimited plans still under contract. The complaint is that Verizon has recently started "pushing" those customers who have unlimited plans but are no longer under contract to get under contract on a plan suitable to their needs. Verizon does have another, more drastic, remedy they could just as legally and morally use: terminate service on the heavy users that Verizon is under no contractual obligation to serve.

Yes I agree that would be the most reasonable thing to do. Or they could put them on some sort of prepay monthly plan and just eat the cost of the first month. Verizon should be moving those customers off those plans. For the vast majority of customers on their unlimited plans they probably have dumb phones or feature phones that only use EVDO data and their "unlimited" data is around 2m / month. They aren't the problem. The people streaming movies are. They probably should be forced to switch.

Sigh, I must be on slashdot. "Unlimited" doesn't mean "free from the laws of physics." It means it isn't limited by the carrier. (If I told you there was no speed limit on the autobahn, would you honestly think I was hoping to drive faster-than-light?)

"Unlimited bandwidth is not possible. You can make it illegal all you want. It doesn't trump physics"

You are confusing the term unlimited with infinite. Unlimited means "we don't limit it". I just found out that Virgin Mobile is doing this as well, and it is fraud. It is very easy to understand why throttling is limiting bandwidth. Suppose I tell you that you can have as much data as you want this month, but I will only send you a single bit per day. I have just limited your data usage to 28 to 31 bits

Thank you! I totally appreciate your helping me to understand the English language! Up until now I thought that, when people said there is no speed limit on the Autobahn [wikipedia.org], it meant that one could go as fast as the car would go. Now, thanks to the combination of your brilliance and eloquence, I now understand that the laws of physics cesase to exist on the Autobahn! I now also understand that every phone company is commiting fraud by claiming that their networks are capable of infinite frigging bandwidth! Either that, or you are an idiot.

In the US about half of Internet traffic in prime time is Netflix. It would behoove a company that sells Internet service to provision sufficient bandwidth to the part of the Internet their customers are paying so much to access. Maybe Netflix should just get into the fiber business and start collecting that $100/month instead of a measly $12 since they are already providing half the service anyway.

I want you to play leapfrog with a a rainbow-colored unicorn, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to see it happen. The customers have already paid for that usage, which is why Verizon isn't entitled to be paid again by Netflix.

That's cause their P/E is sky high. They have about $1.7b in cash and a free cash flow under $3b / yr. Verizon is spent $23b on the initial rollout of FIOS and that was an already existing network in place.

Looks like VPN services like VyprVPN will see some significant growth from Verizon's customers in the short term.While Verizon may want to strongarm Netflix into paying them directly, Level3 could reroute the traffic through other networks that also peer with Verizon since Netflix's traffic isn't at all latency sensitive

Comcast has already said the same thing. There are only about a 1/2 dozen vendors that could handle a surge like that at all. So let's say they push the traffic to AT&T. With AT&T getting their own Netflix's traffic plus Verizon's Netflix traffic they might complain as well.

At some point Netflix is just going to have to pay for asymmetrical traffic and create an agreement.

It's well within Level3's capability to spread the load among all the peers. Netflix is not a ISP, they're a content provider so it's wrong to strongarm them.Do owners of popular venues pay to upgrade the interstate 50 miles out of town?

By the way, Netflix HAS ALREADY PAID both Comcast & Verizon - http://www.theverge.com/2014/4... [theverge.com] That was months ago. So the issue now is between Verizon & Level3.

Is Netflix going to have to pay extortion money to EVERY major provider in the world if their traffic caus

It's well within Level3's capability to spread the load among all the peers

Of course it is. But how does that help? Most of the smaller players would have to buy more bandwidth themselves to carry any substantial portion of Netflix's traffic. They don't have the capacity to accept most of the traffic at the handoff in Oregon. So Level3 would end up having to shift traffic all over the USA themselves, handoff all over the place and then have those smaller players handoff to Verizon. The performance w

Comcast has already said the same thing. There are only about a 1/2 dozen vendors that could handle a surge like that at all. So let's say they push the traffic to AT&T. With AT&T getting their own Netflix's traffic plus Verizon's Netflix traffic they might complain as well.

At some point Netflix is just going to have to pay for asymmetrical traffic and create an agreement.

Ha. If it were a free market, you can bet your bits they wouldn't think of doing anything like that to Netflix. The value of my Comcast/Verizon/AT&T connection drops by about 95% if I can't get Youtube and Netflix.

Without those two, there basically wouldn't be a need for Verizon et al.

REALLY? We should all have 1 GB connections to the home by now and you defend this stalling bullshit????? You KNOW how much bandwidth costs and yet you defend them? You KNOW they are putting off properly upgrading the network to GB to the home so that they an sell you 100Mb, 200Mb, 500Mb then 1 Gb as upgrades. Fuck you.

Instead of calling you a shill, my guess is that your name is 'bobby verizon' and your dad owns the company? Because that's the only reason someone would defend the logic behind Verizon saying 'UNLIMITED', while really meaning "some arbitrary limit that we don't think you'll use, so we'll go a head and label it unlimited anyways."

It sounds like theyre saying this is only on cell towers under high demand: That means it is literally impossible to fulfill requests from all connected subscribers at full time. In that case, QoS is the correct thing to do.

This is just until the news cycle finds its next shinny bloodbath and moves on. Once that happens, then Verizon will slap the bandwidth cap on all the time in every place. They're just trying to find a way to annoy these people into changing plans or switching to another provider without it making front page news.

Verizon charges their customers quite an extra $5 / gig for 4G data. . Data is a common resource heavy users tax the system everyone else uses. Heavy users who are paying help to grow the network. Heavy users who aren't are a tragedy of the commons. They shouldn't have grandfathered these plans in at all.

It sounds like they're only doing this when the network is congested in a specific location. Like they're basically prioritizing slowing down the heavy users when things get busy, rather than everyone. I have a much harder time getting worked up about that, especially when they're waiting until people are out of contract and can easily switch carriers.

I was sent a warning message about this, I'm still grandfathered in on the unlimited plan. I looked at my usage and over 4G of traffic was from facebook... apparently because I was auto-playing videos. Turning this off on an iphone requires you to go to the settings menu on the phone (not, confusingly, the settings menu in the facebook app, but the facebook app settings in the phone settings menu). You can set it to auto-play only on wifi or never.

Then the users. Perhaps every of their customers should begin throttling payments. But coming from an industry where charging both the sender and recipient of the same SMS is the way to do business, not surprising.

You know I'd love to do that, but Google wants me to buy some Cloud storage that's only there if I'm connected to the internet, only there if I have data left this cycle, and only 5s of latency to open the file if I have a solid LTE signal in a non-downtown area. Otherwise (and believe me, there's a lot of otherwise), forget it.

So they don't put microSD slots in their phones anymore. Dummies.Thankfully I just stopped fighting on this matter. I have one station that I like to stream if I want some background

good comment but i have a bit more detail. if you use wifi on your smartphone then it uses about 200mb a month for light in car use (not as driver though)verizon and walmart have a 20 year contract for pay as you go, unlimited data for their straighttalk wireless users.the 'average' smartphone user uses 1 gb per month based on verizons numbers.verizon is crying crocodile tears here, cause 'poor folk' can afford unlimited wireless and can and will stream music and videos if they don't cost them money and th

"why haven't cellular data providers figured out a way to offer more than 5 GB per month at a reasonable price in the past decade".

They have. The FCC has. They need much more of the spectrum to do it which means shutting off broadcast TV which no one uses. The Republicans in congress turned the FCC down, because you know we can never do what Obama wants.

A decade of serious "innovation" in the wireless data space and we're still looking at exactly the same caps?

Why not take the buttloads of profit you a-holes are making an build out your network instead of coming up with this Rube Goldberg throttling crap?

When this question was put to Lowell C. McAdam, CEO of Verizon, his response was, "Because fuck you, that's why. And by the way, sign this new user agreement where you give away any rights to sue Verizon for anything ever for the rest of your life and agree to instead face arbitration by that group of Verizon lawyers, sitting right over there with the "Fuck You,

Who is Verizon not fucking over? I'm not even their customer and I feel like I need some lube, just from hearing about these things. I would never, ever buy any service from Verizon. Every business they're in, they seem to take pleasure in punishing their customers just for using what they tried to purchase.

It's bad enough dealing with Comcast, but thankfully I don't rely on them for all of my services (despite their best efforts) and Sprint treats me pretty well for cell service.

Who is Verizon not fucking over? I'm not even their customer and I feel like I need some lube, just from hearing about these things. I would never, ever buy any service from Verizon. Every business they're in, they seem to take pleasure in punishing their customers just for using what they tried to purchase.

Look, Verizon is clearly evil and it seems almost everything they do only compounds their evil factor... but this is not one of those things. This is perfectly reasonable on the surface: Overloaded tower, less intensive customers line up first in the queue. Utterly fair. If I were a Verizon customer, I would be happy with this; especially if I were not on an unlimited plan. Even if I were on an unlimited plan, if I had already downloaded 4GB of data, I would be cool with sharing the limited resources with o

I'm definitely meeting all the conditions required to be throttled. I'm going to wait until October to see what the impact is for me. Whether or not I stay with Verizon will depend on the severity of the throttling, and how frequently the tower where I live suffers from saturation.

As long as I get at least EvDO speeds (over LTE, for the lower ping and IPv6), I'll probably stay with Verizon and continue my existing usage pattern. I use about 70 to 150 GB per month. I tether with the (legitimate) mobile hotsp

Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past, who already have a suitable wireline connection at home, to subscribe to Verizon limited data plans because they actually do offer more data for less money than their competitors, and the service reliability and availability is second to none.

You cruel, cynical bastard. How often do you have to change your name?

ok... Verizon's taking a real risk with this, Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly, oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill... Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past,

Hope they can live without that, too.

You bet they can. say 3000/year? For 70-150GB per month? I pay $1500/year at least, and use maybe 15-20GB per YEAR.

Your entire post is basically repeating the same failure of logic over and over.They don't put up a new tower for one customer, true. However, 1,000 customers like you mean that 10 more towers hit capacity and ten more need to be added. Verizon isn't making decisions one customer at a time. If they lost a many of their 150 GB / month customers, they could provide better service for a lot more 15GB / month customers and make a lot more money. That would be a good thing for them.

Your entire post is based on the fallacy that each bit I transmit costs them money. This is simply not true.

Verizon's cost on cellular isn't the cost of data from the tower through the rest of the network. That costs something, but very little. The cost is buying, maintaining and upgrading the tower. If your tower is really that empty except for a few people like you, then they could rent out the bandwidth to a regional provider and just buy access for their own customers make revenue off that once you

$70-150 g of cellular data probably cost them between $350-$1200 / month to provide. They will be thrilled to lose you as a customer. You are exactly the problem. You aren't paying for what you are using.

why would it cost them anything at all? The tower is already running, the backhaul is already laid, the proxies are already up, the air is just sitting there asking for 700mhz LTE to be passed through it.

Only way it costs them is if there's someone else they can give that bandwidth to who will give them more money than you.

Yes there are a few preliminary requirements but they are all pretty common.
First off you must have been with Verizon for a few years, great customer loyalty you have got there Verizon...
Secondly you have to have used over 5 gigabytes that month. That is something you can do in about 5 hours, anyone who has even heard of throttling used that or many times that per week...
The last one I know nothing about, but apparently Verizon has enough trouble with infrastructure that they are deploying throttling sc

At first I read about Verizon throttling their "unlimited data plan" customers and I got concerned.

But then I read that the throttling will NOT affect the majority of customers who are paying over the odds for an unlimited data plan that they don't actually need. That's good. So long as they're not affected, things are okay. Please go ahead with your plans, Verizon!

I could have sworn that part of the deal Verizon negotiated when buying the 700Mhz spectrum was that they would not be allowed to interfere with LTE data transfers of unlimited customers when connected via 700Mhz LTE. What happened to that?

I can't wait to be done with Verizon. If a corporation could be diagnosed as insane, Verizon would be locked up. They're flaunting their new XLTE service, bragging about how fast you can move data then smacking down the small percentage of customers who are in a positi

Here's what you're missing. The article is about what happens when a tower hits maximum capacity for a moment.Suppose the hardware on the tower is capable of serving 1,000 people per second*. There are 1,050 people who want to download this second. Sorry, 50 people are going to have to wait one second. The tower can only handle 1,000. That's just a fact. They aren't "messing with" anything, that's just what the hardware is capable of.

This has nothing to do with their network infrastructure, and everything to do with the fact that they would like you to pay out of pocket to stream media on their network. With a 10gb monthly limit on my 4 user plan, if I go away on a trip and watch 3-4 netflix movies in HD, I've used up my entire monthly allowance, and then streaming becomes pay-per-view at $10+ per movie.

They are annoyed that they have customers who still have an "unlimited" plan, and they are effectively converting those users to having a usable 5gb plan.

If the idea of "unlimited" bothers you, then think of an unlimited plan as being capped at whatever the technology currently being used would allow you to download 24/7 at whatever speed the network can support, for the entire billing cycle. As technology improves, that limit goes up... without any predefined limit.

Which is, of course, what "unlimited" means. So in reality, the term is quite accurate. The fact that a person can't physically download an infinite amount of content in a finite period because network speeds are finite is entirely irrelevant.

You know, people used to see that as an excuse to upgrade their network capacity religiously. 10Mbit not fast enough? Let's go buy some 100Mbit equipment. 100Mbit equipment not fast enough? Let's go buy some 1000Mbit stuff. People would invest time and money getting to that next tier, because they wanted to make sure they never hit 75% network utilization as a religion.
And that passion, that fire is gone today. Instead we have fat network execs who are bleeding people dry while complaining that it costs t

I think $10/GB would be reasonable considering that they charge $30 for 3GB.

I think $10/GB is ridiculous; in South Korea, you can buy 1Gbit/s for $20/month - which would take you about 10 seconds to hit $10.

Given that there are 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, that's about $360/hour, or $8,460/day, or to put it another way, a quarter of a million dollars for February, and more than that for other months with more days in them.

Tell me again why they are selling other people's packets as if they were metering water, as opposed to renting us pipes for those packets b

Verizon is happy to sell you dedicated bandwidth for landlines that way. Business buy it for landlines, consumers don't. For cellular you want that kind of bandwidth build your own towers, connect them to a verizon access point and everything will be fine. Until you do that, you are on a shared resource which means your usage affects other people.